Peter Bergen on Winning the GWOT

Steve Clemons' Washington Note hosts a "Terrorism Salon" with various posts from experts on the subject. Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation and a frequent contributor on CNN on terrorism posts on "winning" the global war on terror.

Bergen cites a number of errors made by the Bush administration in fighting a war with al-Qaeda beginning with characterizing it as similar to those against communism and fascism. A second related mistake was "to conflate all sorts of organizations and movements from Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda into a global enemy" despite deep divisions between these groups. The third mistake was the idea that "either you are with us or against us."

Solutions?

A much smarter approach would have been to say is that "if you are not with them you are with us." This is the approach we finally adopted in Iraq after vast amounts of blood and treasure had been spilled over the course of the first four years of the war. On Uncle Sam's payroll now are tens of thousands of militant Sunni Iraqis who two years ago were shooting at Americans.

It is self-evident that "winning" the GWOT--by which I mean turning terrorism into a second-order threat--will take every instrument of state power, including the military one, but that is not sufficient. We have to consider what kind of war are we in and what kind of strategy will it take to prevail.

Belatedly the Bush administration is adopting some of the policies that make sense to defeat al Qaeda and lower the temperature in the Muslim world--restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, engaging with Iran, coopting Sunni militants in Iraq. Historians are likely to conclude that these measures came too late to salvage the reputations of Bush or Rice. And there the next administration has an opening: to set a course that is based not on an ideological interpretation of the threat but approaches it with the kind of realism that the Bush administration has finally begun to adopt.

Bergen is the latest in a long line of experts on foreign policy and counter-terrorism to make a case for a more balanced approach bringing economic, diplomatic and cultural resources to bear along with strategic military action. We face a clear choice in November between a candidate who would follow Bergen's prescriptions (Obama) and one with a long record of advocacy for the sort of militaristic approach that has proven so costly to the US in so many ways.

UPDATE: Spencer Ackerman contributes a piece in the Washington Independent about Australian counter-insurgency (COIN) expert David Kilcullen, consultant to General David Petraeus and Secretary of State Condalezza Rice and author of a handbook on COIN, in which he advocates the same integrated, multi-pronged approach.